Released between 2016 and 2019, its six studio albums use degrading loops of sampled ballroom music to portray the progression of dementia and related neurological conditions.

Caregivers of people with dementia also praised the albums for increasing empathy for patients among younger listeners, although some medics felt the series was too linear.

Kirby drew influence from the haunted-ballroom scene of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's work The Shining (1980), as heard on the debut release of the alias, Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1999).

[7][8][9] Ideas of deterioration, melancholy, confusion, and abstractness are present throughout, and according to writer Alexandra Weiss, Kirby's work "raises significant questions about Western attitudes toward death.

[16] Author Sarah Nove praised Everywhere's lack of a physical form of aura, while Bandcamp Daily's Matt Mitchell wrote that the series ends in "ethereal catharsis".

"[2] The sound of Everywhere has also been compared to the style of electronic musician Burial;[10] author Matt Colquhoun wrote for The Quietus that both artists "highlight the 'broken time of the twenty-first century.

'"[22] While reviewing the first stage, writers Adrian Mark Lore and Andrea Savage commended the record for enjoyers of Basinski, Stars of the Lid, and Brian Eno.

"[2] In their Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, Bloomsbury Academic describes the later stages as "a disorienting cut-up of slurred reminiscences bathing in a reverberant fog", relating them to amusia and its effects on musical memory.

[29] Like An Empty Bliss,[30] Stage 1 features the opening segment of tracks from the 1920s and 1930s, looped for long lengths and altered with pitch changes, reverberation, overtones, and vinyl crackle.

[40] Track titles, such as "Surrendering to Despair", represent the patient's awareness of their disorder and the accompanying sorrow, while "The Way Ahead Feels Lonely" is directly lifted from a book on dementia by Sally Magnusson.

[41] The songs play for longer times and feature fewer loops, but are more deteriorated in quality,[10] symbolizing the patient's realization of their faulty memory and the resulting feelings of denial.

Their titles become more abstract, combining names of songs from the previous stages and An Empty Bliss to create phrases such as "Sublime Beyond Loss" and "Internal Bewildered World".

[1] By the second track of Stage 3, "And Heart Breaks", the last coherent version of "Heartaches" can be found, where its horn aspects become more similar to white noise.

[27] The surreal and incoherent aspect of the melodies was compared by Bowe to experimental musician Oval's album 94 Diskont (1995), as they "capture the darkest, most damaged sounds in the project's lifespan.

"[5] The album expands its noise influence and has similarities with the works of Merzbow and John Wiese;[10] in its ear-piercing, more violent tone,[47] coherent melodies lose significance and are replaced by overlapped samples.

[48] The record uses the most vocals of the series, including whispers and recognisable English lyrics; near the end of the opening track, a man announces, "This selection will be a mandolin solo by Mr. James Fitzgerald.

[51] The segment samples a performance of an English translation of Bach's aria "Lasst mich ihn nur noch einmal küssen"[d] of the St Luke Passion, BWV 246.

This aria was also used on the track "Friends Past Reunited" from Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1999) and A Stairway to the Stars (2001), two of the Caretaker's first albums,[3] a fact interpreted by writer Paul Simpson of AllMusic as the alias in a "full circle moment".

[1][57] Kirby stated that the first three stages have "subtle but crucial differences", presenting the same general style "based on the mood and the awareness that a person with the condition would feel.

[68][69] Beaten Frowns After features a grey unravelling scroll on a vacant horizon, with newspaper folds similar to a brain's creases,[36] which Teen Ink writer Sydney Leahy likened to the patient's awareness of the disease's progression.

[40][65][70] Hag presents a kelp plant distorted to the extreme, which Sam Goldner of Tiny Mix Tapes described as "a vase spilling out into ripples of disorder.

[87][88] This statement misled some to believe that Kirby himself had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, namely The Fader's Jordan Darville and Marvin Lin of Tiny Mix Tapes.

In March 2018, Kirby was featured at Festival Présences électronique [fr] in Paris,[104] where he played a version of the 1944 song "Ce Soir" by singer Tino Rossi.

"[10] Luka Vukos, in his review for the blog HeadStuff, argued that the "empathy machine" of the series "is characterized not by words", and its power "rests in [Kirby's] marrying of [the vinyl record] with the most contemporary modes of digital recall and manipulation.

[16][140][141] Daily Record writer Darren McGarvey claimed he felt "struck by a deep sense of gratitude" after finishing Everywhere, stating that is the "power of a proper piece of art",[142] and author Cole Quinn called Everywhere the greatest album of all time.

[143] Later in October, users on the social media platform TikTok created a challenge of listening to the entire series in one sitting, due to its long length and existential themes.

[144][145][146] Kirby knew about the phenomenon from an exponential growth of views on the series' YouTube upload (over 32 million as of 11 February 2025);[5] only 12% of them came from the platform's algorithm, whereas direct searches made up over 50%.

[150] Some TikTok users shared fictional creepypasta stories of the series with claims that it cures patients or, conversely, that it introduces symptoms of dementia in people.

"[153] The series was also popularized for its relation to the Backrooms, a creepypasta about an endless empty office space, which writer Silvia Trevisson said stemmed from their similar portrayals of absurd states of mind.

One Iowa State University researcher found the series to present the "chilling reality" of Alzheimer's disease, highlighting the gradual progression of calmness into confusion.